Members of the ARC Ensemble of the Royal Conservatory of Music spent three days this week recording their fourth album — the first one for prestigious English label Chandos — at Koerner Hall. Being allowed to witness a few hours of the process was an eye- and ear-opening experience.
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The story of the album itself is a fascinating one, but what impressed me most was the recording process itself.
The new album celebrates the music of Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984). The German composer and pianist (born Paul Frankenburger) emigrated to Palestine in 1933, after the Nazis came to power. He is celebrated by Israelis as one of their great founding composers but not widely known in the rest of the world.
According to the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, Ben-Haim wrote about 100 pieces of music, many of them for chamber ensemble, before he left Germany. And this is where the ARC Ensemble and its artistic director Simon Wynberg come in.
Wynberg has helped the ARC Ensemble build an international profile through a focus on the rich and still not well-explored vein of music written by central European composers exterminated or sidelined by totalitarianism — or shoved aside by the power and influence of the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg & co.
Ben-Haim’s music is accessible but not simple. It is tonal but not late-Romantic. Yesterday, as I listened to violist Steven Dann and pianist Dianne Werner work their way through Two Landscapes for viola and piano from photocopies of Ben-Haim’s clean manuscript, I couldn’t help thinking of the later music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) — possessing a simplicity capable of conveying a lot of meaning.
The album is due for release in June, so there was no time to waste this week.
But a recording doesn’t happen quickly.
I arrived just before 10 a.m. on the final day. Dianne Werner was already warming up at the piano onstage. Steven Dann had just pulled his jacket off and was tuning up his viola. And recording producer David Frost and engineer Carl Talbot — fresh from a recording project with Renée Fleming at a church in Hampstead, London, according to Wynberg — were hard at work.
Frost and Talbot would fuss with the array of microphones that fanned out from the epicentre where the performers were stationed. They would dash back to the sound booth at the back of Koerner Hall, and fuss with their devices as they listened on earphones and exchanged terse comments on what they were hearing.
The words were in English, but used in a way so specific to their needs that the language made no sense to me.
I had to banish any thoughts of technicians sitting in front of massive boards covered in sliders and dials and gauges. Talbot sat in front a standard flat computer screen, controlling everything with a mouse.
Frost turned to Talbot at one point, saying he wanted “a bit more roundness.”
Click.
Talbot: “The piano’s a bit too fluffy.”
Frost: “Maybe a bit. Let’s move it over 2 inches.”
So a microphone sitting next to a 9-foot-long grand piano in a hall capable of seating 1,100 people would get moved 2 inches. At one point acknowledging my curious stares, Frost says that recording a piano with another instrument always presents difficulties.
Here’s what the stage part of the process looked like:
The two instruments need to fill the recording space together but the engineer also needs to be able to full separate each instrument’s sound to tweak the balance here and there — “and then make it sound natural,” Frost explains.
Two hours later, with Werner and Dann playing practically the whole time, Frost and Talbot had a take of a 3-minute piece that satisfied their hyper-critical ears. Well, almost — Frost had also been keeping copious notes, scribbling hieroglyphics on his photocopy of the score.
There were two instances where piano and viola were not absolutely together, and Frost had reservations about the overall sound quality of a handful of bow attacks on single notes.
Werner and Dann listened to Frost’s corrections like dutiful schoolchildren, circled the offending areas on their own scores, and prepared to play the piece yet again, edging closer to interpretive perfection.
I knew that a producer would be concerned about every last detail of sound, but had never imagined the degree to which this person also influences the interpretation itself.
Plato’s Philosopher-King was no chymeric figure, but a real, flesh-and-blood, black-t-shirt-and-jeans-wearing audio geek.
Wynberg, my patient guide and interpreter, explained that, besides balance, texture and dynamics in the overall sound, “a good producer is another source of musical influence” who is meant to bring constructive, not opinionated, ideas to the project. “It slows down the process, but it makes the product better.
“I trust him totally,” said Wynberg.
Oh, and that take everyone liked? It came off only two of the microphones, both of them clunky-looking RCA models that, Wynberg tells me, still use 1930s technology.
As in so much else that distinguishes classical music from pop, the key to success is in preparation and the setup.
From the choice of programme to the final quality of the recorded sound, everything needs to be as close to perfect before the engineer hits the ‘rec’ button. Contrast that to so much pop work, where various bits and pieces are sliced and spliced and mixed and modified after the fact.
What is natural to a pop listener would be unnatural for a fan of classical music.
Where a jazz fan might like to hear a wrinkle or two from her or her favourite artists, there is a culture of perfection in the classical world. A wrong note laid down for posterity is like a permanent spike through the skull for some artists, a mark of weakness rather than a symbol of humanity.
I’m generalizing far too much, of course. There are finicky hip hop artists and classical performers who prefer recordings of live concerts, warts and all, so that the interpretations can soak up and radiate a bit of the special energy that only a real audience can supply.
Several of the pieces on the Ben-Haim album are going to be world-premiere recordings, which puts extra pressure on Wynberg and the musicians to do as good a job as possible.
There’s an early Piano Quartet on the album that was pieced together by ARC Ensemble member, pianist David Louie. His new computer-set score will then become the definitive performance version. It is a responsibility no one has taken lightly.
I asked Wynberg about the group’s switch to Chandos. He said the move was largely due to the fact that there is almost no one left at Sony Classical (which owns the RCA Red Seal label on which the ARC Ensemble’s other albums have been published under) in the United States who knows or cares about classical music.
Especially through its international touring, the ARC Ensemble has done everything it can think of to market its CDs, but Sony lately hasn’t been interested in helping out.
Wynberg points out that this is the case currently at all the old major labels. He says the really good work is being done by those labels dedicated to classical music. He repeatedly mentions England’s Hyperion — home to such Canadian greats as Marc-André Hamelin, Gerald Finley and Angela Hewitt — and Chandos.
The artistic director has a personal connection to Chandos, as well. It was his label when he first began recording as a 20-something classical guitarist. His engineer those three decades ago was Ralph Couzens, who is now managing director.
“I sent him an email saying, ‘Remember me?'” smiles Wynberg. And the rest quickly fell into place. Wynberg wanted an international label with enough prestige to get the attention of music critics and audiophiles in Europe.
Unlike the Sony/RCA relationship, which was a three-album contract, the Chandos album is a trial run.
I ask if it’s a good idea to start a business relationship with such obscure repertoire. Wynberg counters that the choice anyone faces these days is pretty stark: either record the core repertoire that has already been done umpteen times, or strike out with something a bit more unusual.
“We’ve embraced the disadvantage of doing stuff that is unknown but will get attention because it is unknown,” is how Wynberg puts it. “I would rather we do things where we’re breaking new ground and introducing people to new repertoire.”
It’s a choice that the Conservatory’s patrons and supporters have embraced. They, after all, have to raise the money to pay for these recordings, since that’s not something record labels routinely pay for anymore.
So the music they choose has to be of the same calibre as the performances that follow.
Like the Chandos brand giving automatic luster and value to anything it issues, the ARC Ensemble brand is beginning to mean something — thanks to this sort of fastidious approach.
It is really unusual for any music school to have an ensemble made up of faculty — as Wynberg points out, the scheduling issues alone are scary. But the ARC Ensemble is showing that it can be done at the very highest level of musical quality, a fact that they remind me of every time I hear their members perform.
The bottom line is, there’s no getting around those hours and hours of preparation and practice and fussing.
Remember that next time you listen to a nice piece of classical music through your earbuds on the subway.
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Here are clarinetist Joaquin Valdepeãs, violinists Benjamin Bowman and Erika Raum, violist Steven Dann and cellist Bryan Epperson performing the opening movement of Paul Ben-Haim’s Clarinet Quintet at the Enav Center, Tel Aviv in 2011:
To further illustrate Ben-Haim’s aesthetic, here is the Canzonetta from Five Pieces for Piano, another piece that will be on the album (hopefully in a slightly more dynamic interpretation):
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
